Comment by prymitive
16 hours ago
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.
Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10?
I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.
The industry has always found it strangely taboo to actually talk about the wide variance in developer skill.
1 reply →
Any competent developer knows there are limits to prompting.
Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well).
Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.
3 replies →
while 0:
something like this?
I think the worst is when they are skilled.
You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year.
It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.
Maybe it's because my org gave us permission to fail and make mistakes, but I transitioned to AI driven development pretty quickly and am having fun learning how to best drive the AI to produce good quality code, with harnesses and patterns to prevent mistakes and a process to learn and rollback. It's a different kind of engineering now. I find myself thinking more product level and system level than if else branches. I think I've been able to upskill in ways that I wouldn't have been able to if I were still writing code by hand, mainly because I have the bandwidth to do so now.
I only have 10 years of experience, so I'm not trying to say that your lived experience is invalid, but personally I figure if this is the way the industry is heading then I may as well try to learn how to thrive within the new environment.
A lot of the joy I used to have doing this job is gone. I wrote some recursive code to turn nested API parameters into Elastic search queries, it was the last really cool thing I did pre-Ai. Sometimes I look at that code with a fond nostalgia, I'll never write code like that again unless I go out of my way to do it for fun. I don't even know what being a software dev will look like in a year from now.
This is my biggest problem with the current state of things. The loss in quality of life out weights the gains in productivity. And they are concentrated on highly conscientiousness individuals, those who already got silently taxed with most of the 80% of the work to get the last 20% of the results. So it is now compounding, if you care your workload will approximate 99,99..% of the total workload divided by the number of high conscientiousness individuals in your team/organization.
The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.
I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.
1 reply →
Kids, young folks, anyone reading: this is golden handcuffs.
If you’re unhappy, make a change.
1 reply →
I mean, we're just the neo-luddites in this case. Or maybe the rust belt when jobs moved elsewhere.
The real question isn't if things are going to change around our jobs, its are we going to be able to move fast enough to avoid starving in the streets?
1 reply →
I'm in the same boat as you... 30 years of experience writing software, and now I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs without reading the PR. I'm just supposed to press a button. I'm looking for a new job, but it's going to be difficult to find one in tech that isn't a complete AI-psychosis shitshow.
3 replies →
I'm not a dev and that's exactly what I do but I also have absolutely no skill in coding, and am not paid...
People doing that will be replaced, in best case scenario, by cheap labor, and worst case by computers.
I think I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read it. It would be crazy not to take advantage of this. Of course it does get hard to resist the temptation to just become ever lazier over time.
It fixes it at face value, for now. The long-term effects of corporate nearsightedness might be too great to absorb this time around.
This is my exact process nowadays when debugging some weird Linux wifi driver issue or something that came up after upgrade.
But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.
This is a sign of poor harness configuration and/or org level constraints (lack of MCP support, etc.) With properly configured and prompted agents error copy-pasta should be the exception not the norm.
All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system.
But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.
The incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year.
It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.
It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
2 replies →
I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.
> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.
I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.
9 replies →
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
Infinitely, that's a stretch.
Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.
Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.
I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine.
But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.
Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.
12 replies →
> very competent who know when and how to use it and for what.
More productive? Sure, to an extent.
Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here
2 replies →
[dead]